Here is a fact that should embarrass the Television Academy. The most celebrated body of work in modern television, the interlocking universe Vince Gilligan built out of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is also one of the great Emmy tragedies of the era. Better Call Saul was nominated 53 times and won exactly nothing, the most-decorated loser in the history of the awards. Now Gilligan is back with a show that just landed 18 nominations, and the most interesting question of this Emmy season is whether the curse finally breaks.
The Family Closes Ranks
The occasion for all this is a conversation. Gilligan recently sat down with Rhea Seehorn, Bryan Cranston, and Bob Odenkirk to talk about Pluribus, and if you know the Emmy history of those three names, the seating chart tells its own story. Cranston is the champion, a multiple winner for playing Walter White. Odenkirk is the hard-luck case, nominated six times for Best Lead Actor as Jimmy McGill, once for every season of Better Call Saul, and sent home empty-handed every single time. And Seehorn is the one the Academy took the longest to notice at all. Put them at one table and you have the whole complicated Emmy story of the Gilligan-verse in three chairs.
It is a fitting image, because the entire Pluribus promotional campaign has leaned into the idea of the Breaking Bad family beckoning Seehorn’s character home. In one memorable bit of marketing, a parade of familiar faces from Gilligan’s old universe appeared on Carol’s television, smiling and telling her to join them, playing the show’s blissful hive mind as a kind of in-joke. Watch the real-life version of that reunion, the creator and his most famous collaborators gathered to champion his new leading lady, and it reads as something warmer. It looks like a family making very sure that the recognition which slipped through their fingers for years does not get away again.
The Role Written for the Overlooked
Because Seehorn is the heart of this story. She spent six seasons as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul, delivering what a lot of us considered the finest sustained performance on television, and the Emmys spent most of that run pretending not to see her. She went unnominated through the show’s celebrated middle seasons, the peak Kim years, and earned nods only near the very end. She has never won. When Gilligan set out to build his next series, he built it as a showcase for exactly the actress the industry had undervalued, writing the role of Carol Sturka specifically for her. She has said as much herself, thanking him for the part of a lifetime and for a belief in her that the trophy cases never reflected.
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The vindication has been swift and total. Seehorn has already swept the precursor awards for Pluribus, collecting a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice trophy, and she now arrives at the Emmys as the odds-on favorite in the Lead Actress race, her first nomination as a lead. Gilligan himself is nominated for both writing and directing, categories in which he has, remarkably, never won, despite the four Emmys sitting on his shelf from his producing work. Pluribus, in other words, is not just an awards contender. It is a reckoning years in the making.
Save the World From Happiness
Lost in the horse-race handicapping is how genuinely strange and good the show underneath it is. Pluribus hands Seehorn a premise built to her exact strengths. She plays Carol Sturka, a misanthropic novelist of the romance-fantasy variety who wakes into a nightmare disguised as paradise. A pandemic of contentment has swept the planet, melding humanity into a serene, smiling hive mind, and Carol is one of the tiny handful of people immune to the bliss. The logline is delicious in its simplicity. The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness. Carol is the last grouch standing, and Gilligan is dead serious about arguing she is one of the good guys.
That inversion places Pluribus in a rich and specific tradition. It is a photo-negative of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the pod people are not blank but beatific, and it borrows the central unease of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of a society drugged into frictionless joy, forever asking whether a manufactured happiness is worth the self you trade away for it. There is a heavy dose of Twilight Zone in its DNA too, which makes sense, because Pluribus returns Gilligan to the science fiction roots he grew up in writing for The X-Files. It is his first original creation outside the Heisenberg universe in more than two decades, and by the accounts of nearly everyone who has seen it, the swing connects.
What ties it back to everything he has made is the thesis Gilligan returns to again and again, the one he named in that very conversation: he writes ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Walter White was a chemistry teacher. Jimmy McGill was a small-time hustler. Carol Sturka is a crank with a book tour. Each is a recognizable, flawed, unremarkable person shoved to the center of something enormous, and the drama is always in watching them decide who they are going to be under that pressure. Our ongoing appreciation of the Gilligan-verse has always circled that same idea, and Pluribus is the purest sci-fi distillation of it yet.
One Win Out of Many
The show pulled more nominations than any other freshman drama this year, an eyebrow-raising haul for a series that only premiered in November. The competition is fierce and the ceremony is still ahead, so nothing is promised. But the shape of the season is unmistakable. After more than a decade of being the most nominated and least rewarded corner of prestige television, the Gilligan universe has a real chance to convert, and it would be poetic if the win that finally lands belongs to Rhea Seehorn, for a role that exists precisely because the awards kept overlooking her.
Pluribus is available to stream on Apple TV, and this is the ideal moment to catch up before the envelopes open. Come for the meticulous world-building and the year’s best performance. Stay to find out whether, out of so very many nominations, this universe can finally manage one win.
